This invention relates to the field of computer application analysis. In particular, the invention relates to business application monitoring and analysis.
Due diligence in this context is a phase or a process carried out in an outsourcing situation. It may be described as having the objective of developing a greater understanding and validating a client's environment and business processes to be outsourced. This is necessary in order to efficiently assess the effort, manage performance and identify strategic risk for an outsourced partnership.
When taking over the business processes and applications of the outsourced activities, there is a clear need to map, document, analyze and understand those business process and applications.
Similar needs arise as part of business application modernization, in which (legacy) applications of the client are replaced with modern applications. Here, and in particular during what is known as the extraction phase, the operational aspects of the applications, their data model and their usage patterns are all needed in order to support the transition. Again, there is a need to map, document, analyze and understand the applications, the data models, and their usage.
Conventionally, activities like due diligence or the extraction phase are performed by interviewing customer personnel, be they operators of the applications or management, and by carrying out code analysis of the business applications.
Interviews are time consuming and thus also very expensive, and are also incomplete in nature as it is hard to make sure that all aspects of a business process or an application are covered. Code analysis is powerful in some cases but is limited to the static analysis of an application—the way it was designed—while not being able to capture its dynamic aspects—the way it is actually used.